The Acts of the Apostles describes how the first Christians in Jerusalem, led by Peter and Jesus' brother James, sold all their property and laid the money at the apostles' feet. Everything was divided equally. This was not a political manifesto to change society but rather a preparation for what was to come. The early church expected the world to end at any moment and for the kingdom of God to be established. By renouncing private property, they stepped completely out of the Roman and Jewish economic world to live in total purity during the last days.
The problem was that when you sell your farms and fields and consume the money without producing anything new, the money eventually runs out. The experiment ended in absolute disaster. The early church starved and the apostle Paul had to spend years traveling around Greece and Turkey to collect money to save "the poor of Jerusalem" from starvation.
In the decades after the crucifixion, the situation in Judea became increasingly desperate. Roman oppression increased, taxes became heavier, and temple corruption became worse. Extreme rebel groups such as the Zealots emerged. The message that the poor would inherit the earth and that the last would be first became political propaganda to legitimize an armed earthly revolt. When the great Jewish revolt against the Romans broke out in earnest in 66 AD, Jerusalem became a war zone. Fanatical rebel groups such as the Zealots took over the city and prepared for the final battle against Rome's legions. The pressure on all groups to join the "holy struggle for freedom" was enormous. Anyone who hesitated was considered a traitor.
But the early Jesus movement in the city made a decision that was completely incomprehensible to those around them. Instead of taking up arms or supporting the revolt, the congregation in Jerusalem left the city. According to the early church historians Eusebius and Epiphanius, the early church gathered and remembered Jesus’ prophecies and warnings: that when they saw Jerusalem surrounded by armies, they should not stay and fight for the nation, but flee to the mountains. They broke away and traveled east, crossed the Jordan River, and took refuge in Pella, a pagan, Greco-Roman city in the Decapolis.
In 70 AD, Jerusalem fell. The temple was set on fire and the Romans massacred hundreds of thousands of people, erasing the old religious power structure forever. The Zealots and rebels, who until the last believed that God would intervene militarily, were utterly crushed. If the early Christians had remained in the city and allowed themselves to be drawn into the political and nationalist uprising, they would most likely have died there and then.
The apostles in Jerusalem had sold everything and tried to build a static ideal society instead of the itinerant spreading of the message that Jesus had commanded. But what many scholars today consider to be the purest and original form of the Jesus movement was the "itinerant charismatics", the itinerant movement. The prayer "Give us this day our daily bread" was a physical reality for them. By owning absolutely nothing, they forced themselves into total trust. In the villages they preached about the kingdom of God, healed the sick, ate what was offered and then moved on.
They worked mainly in Syria and northern Palestine and the church at the end of the 100th century felt compelled to write a manual for how local congregations should deal with them, the Didache, the teachings of the twelve apostles. The Didache contains clear instructions for how to recognize a genuine prophet from a swindler who only wants free food:
★ A true apostle may stay in a congregation's house for one day, at most two. If he stays for three days, he is a false prophet.
★ When the prophet leaves the village, he is only allowed to take bread with him to get him to the next place to sleep. If he asks for money, he is a false prophet.
★ If a prophet, under spiritual inspiration, orders a meal of food, and then eats it himself, he is a false prophet.
The church and the settled congregations thus marginalized those who actually obeyed Jesus' command, those for whom this was the only way to live and die for God in a world that was about to perish.
The men and women who took Jesus' mission command with the utmost, literal seriousness eventually became an existential threat to the institution that was being built in his name. It was not necessarily that the early church wanted to be mean to them, but it was an inevitable sociological clash. A tug-of-war arose between those who lived out Jesus' message and those who tried to build a stable religion that could function in the world.
Scholars (such as sociologist Gerd Theissen) usually describe this conflict between the "itinerant charismatics" and the "settled congregations" in a few crucial steps:
**The delay of the end of the world**
Jesus' radical call to leave everything, to own nothing, and to be constantly on the move was tailor-made for a world that was in its very last trembling minutes. But the decades passed and Jesus did not return as quickly as they had thought. The congregations felt that they had to survive over generations. They needed to organize poor relief, raise children, have permanent meeting places and appoint leaders. In that structure there was no longer room for anarchistic vagabond prophets who refused to adapt.
**The arrival of the rich patrons**
When the church spread throughout the Roman Empire, meetings took place in so-called house churches. These churches were often held in the homes of wealthy Christians who could afford large houses and who often financed the activities of the congregation. When a wandering prophet entered the home of a wealthy Roman woman or man and began preaching how difficult it was for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God, it created problems. The settled congregations were dependent on their wealthy financiers and the radical apostles made these financiers appear to be spiritually corrupt.
**Control and hierarchy, the rise of the bishop**
The wandering prophets obeyed only God and the Holy Spirit. But when the congregations became permanent, they elected local leaders: episkopoi, overseers. A local bishop who tried to keep order in his congregation was disgusted when a charismatic prophet suddenly appeared out of nowhere, captivated the people with radical and sometimes downright anti-social sermons, and then simply disappeared, leaving it to the bishop to clean up the mess. The bishops began to demand that all teaching be done through the official, resident hierarchy.
In 313 AD, the unthinkable happened: Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity. Within a few decades, the church was transformed from a persecuted grassroots movement into the powerful state religion of Rome. The bishops suddenly received palaces, tax exemptions, and political power. The church installed itself comfortably and smoothly in the empire. For the majority, this was a victory. But for a group of radical seekers, it was a spiritual disaster. They felt that the church had sold its soul for power and convenience. Since they could no longer be martyrs for their faith, since the state no longer executed them, they created what was called the "white martyrdom" - they chose to die voluntarily from the lures of the world.
In pure protest against the wealthy and politicized church in the cities, thousands of men and women went into the wilderness. They settled in natural caves, old ruins or simple houses far out in the countryside. There were no bishops, no rich patrons, no politics and no status. They lived on the verge of starvation and devoted every hour of the day to a merciless internal battle against their own egoism. Their goal was apatheia - a state of total inner stillness and freedom from worldly desires.
The official church initially regarded these desert dwellers as troublesome extremists, but their spiritual authority and integrity eventually became so enormous that the bishops were forced to relate to them. The solution was monasticism, a compromise in which the church offered them a formal, isolated place in the system, so that they could continue to rule the cities themselves.
That may be so, but God's will was of course to be done anyway.
And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come. — Matthew 24:14
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